Conference_programme: 18.3 - Voice accommodations in room acoustics and noise

Lecture: The relation between vocal fry and room acoustics among bilingual English-Spanish speakers

Author(s): Cantor-Cutiva Lady Catherine, Bottalico Pasquale, Hunter Eric

Summary:
Purpose: Define the changes on occurrence of vocal fry among bilingual English-Spanish speakers under different virtual simulated acoustic conditions. Method: 34 bilingual English-Spanish young adults participated in this cross-sectional study. Participants produced two speech samples (one in English and one in Spanish) under nine different room acoustic conditions (simulated). The text in English consisted on the first six sentences of “The Rainbow Passage”, equal to about 30 seconds of speaking. The text in Spanish was a fragment of the text ʻEl Caballero de la Armadura Oxidadaʼ (The Knight in Rusty Armor, a standardized text in Spanish) with similar duration of speaking. Result: Native English speakers tend to produce vocal fry more often under the “No Noise” condition compared with noisy conditions. On the contrary, production of vocal fry among native Spanish speakers seem to be no affected by background noise conditions. Conclusions: Bilinguals English-Spanish speakers tended to produce less vocal fry when they were speaking in Spanish with babble background noise than when they were speaking in English with “No background noise”.

Corresponding author

Name: Dr Lady Catherine Cantor Cutiva

e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Country: United States